This proposal seeks partial support for a four-day meeting of biogerontologists to be held in conjunction with the 2009 Annual Scientific Meeting of The Gerontological Society of America (GSA) in Atlanta, Georgia, November 19-22, 2009. The GSA is the largest organization in the United States devoted to the study of aging. Eleven invited symposia have been developed to reflect current areas of rapidly progressing research and explore biological mechanisms underlying the processes of aging and age-associated diseases in order to collect information useful for maintaining the health and vitality of the elderly. The theme of the 2009 meeting "Creative Approaches to Healthy Aging" is both timely and exciting. To fit this theme, several of the invited symposia will address issues that impact healthy aging, such as sessions on nutritional effects in aging, tumor suppression and aging and intervention in the aging process. Our goal is to bring diverse disciplines together to form an exciting milieu for interchange between broad areas of expertise. The Biological Sciences component of the meeting will focus on mechanisms of aging in health and age-associated diseases to gain new insight into understanding of the aging process. We plan to integrate the invited symposia with submitted poster sessions and disseminate useful scientific information to interested participants ahead of the meeting in order to create a rich environment for the exchange of ideas and experimental protocols. It is intended that this conference will provide the attendees with a broad overview of the direction of recent research in the biology of aging and provide a guide as to how future research will evolve.